Monday, January 19, 2015

Since the
1970s modern societies have been increasingly faced with social issues caused
by a reliance on a form of life that technological development is making
redundant: work. Competition drives
companies to eject human beings from the labour process even while it relies on
those people as consumers and producers of value. Equally, more human beings
than ever before depend upon the capitalist production process for their
survival, yet at this historical juncture it appears no longer to have need of
them. It is this contradiction that some contemporary social critics have
diagnosed as the basis of a crisis of civilisation through which we are
currently living. The symptoms of this crisis are manifold and, one can argue,
affect every aspect of society: privatisation, financialisation and economic
crises, mass unemployment, the casualisation of labour and austerity
programmes, regional conflict, the rise of political extremism, growing wealth
inequality, individualisation, school shootings and the ever-growing number of
people suffering from narcissistic personality disorders, to name but a few.

Despite the
sheer scale of problems that society currently faces, the dominant social
discourse has rarely considered that a crisis of the very categories of
capitalist society could be the source of the problem. Work, in particular, is
central to modern notions of individual and collective identity, of morality
and even of human nature. It is the means through which individuals are
expected to realise themselves and to gain access to social wealth. It is
perhaps for this reason that, while work is often seen as central to resolving
the current crisis – either through calls for higher wages and the right to
work or through attacks on immigrants and the unemployed – it is rarely seen as
the problem in itself. The aim of this conference is therefore to ask what might
a critique of work usefully offer us in addressing contemporary social issues
and, if one will allow it, the possibility of a greater crisis of modern civilisation.

Contributors
might consider:

·What
kinds of critique of work are necessary, on the basis of what criteria and in
the name of what alternatives?

·What
hampers such a critique and how can we remove, go around or through these barriers?

·What
critical theories can usefully contribute to a contemporary critique of work?

·How
can contemporary social movements benefit from a critique of work?

·How
might a theoretical critique of work manifest itself practically and how might
critiques of work in practice inform theoretical critiques?

·What
lessons can we learn from historical and contemporary social movements against
work?

·What
might a critique of work tell us about the political, economic and
psychological forms and changes that society is currently experiencing?

·What
are particularly unexamined aspects of the critique of work that need
addressing?

·How
widespread and persistent are critiques of work in contemporary social movements
and what kinds of critique of work have they developed?

·What
useful relationship might the critique of work have with critiques of the
state, patriarchy, politics and other social forms?

·What
alternatives to work still exist, have existed and might exist?

Confirmed
keynote speakers will be: Anselm Jappe
(author of Guy Debord, Les Aventures de la marchandise, Crédit à mort) and Norbert Trenkle (author of Die Große
Entwertung, Dead Men Working). Both of our keynotes are members of the wertkritik,
or “critique of value”, school of Marxian critique.

Abstracts
of 350 words, with a small bio, should be sent to Dr Alastair Hemmens (hemmensa@cardiff.ac.uk) by 20 February 2015.

The
conference itself will take place at Cardiff University, Wales, on 10 July 2015.

This research
is funded by the Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship: Dr Alastair Hemmens,
“‘Ne travaillez jamais’: The Critique of Work in Nineteenth- and
Twentieth-Century French Thought, from Charles Fourier to Guy Debord.”

Contributors to this anthology trace how neoliberalism has
impacted education. These effects range from the commercialization and
quasi-privatization of pre-school to post-secondary education, to
restrictions on democratic practice and research and teaching, to the
casualization of labour and labour replacing technologies, and the descent
of the university into the market which threatens academic freedom. The
end result is a comprehensive and wide-ranging review of how neoliberalism
has served to displace, if not destroy, the role of the university as a
space for a broad range of perspectives.

Neoliberalism stifes the university’s ability to
incubate critical ideas and engage with the larger society.
Entrepreneurship, however, is pursued as an ideological carrier serving to
prepare students for a life of precarity just as the university itself is
being penetrated and occupied by corporations. The result is an
astonishing tale of transformation, de-democratization and a narrowing of
vision and purpose.

Eleanor Marx was an agitator, an organiser and a writer. At
a time of extraordinary upheaval, she was at the heart of world-changing
movements. Whether organising support for refugees fleeing France after the
crushing of the Paris Commune, or galvanising support for the new unionism in
the 1880s, her belief in the power of workers to organise and change the world for
the better remained central. Her words and actions have helped change our
world.

A passionate writer and translator, her texts crackled with
outrage at the desperate living and working conditions of London’s poor. She
was inspired by the thousands of women workers who struck back and she
developed new and important insights on questions of sexual equality and
socialism.

Much more than the daughter of Karl Marx or the lover of a feckless academic,
Eleanor Marx was a remarkable and revolutionary woman. This addition to the
popular Rebel's Guide series places her back alongside other revolutionary
leaders, where she belongs.

As we view the current crises – over racist police murder
and brutality, endless war, poverty wages, and environmental destruction –
activists are increasingly looking at capitalism as the underlying source of
these problems and the obstacle to their solution. While many point to
neoliberal capitalism as the culprit, this implicitly suggests that another,
more humane and just capitalism is possible. This meeting will take a
different tack, examining capitalism as such, as a system in need of total
uprooting.

Background readings for those interested these questions are
almost limitless, but for starters we suggest Marx’s “Wage
Labor and Capital,” a short text written for workers.

Sponsored by the West Coast Chapter, International
Marxist-Humanist Organization

As a part of the 9th Critical Management Studies Conference, 8-10 July 2015,
University of Leicester
Theme: Is there an alternative?
Management after critique

Artists work in groups. This is a primary fact of artistic production.
Collective work is an a priori, a reality of creative life. At nearly every
moment artists are working together in one way or another and under many
different arrangements. Without the others no one can succeed. Artists’ groups
have helped them to survive in a capitalist system which values art primarily
as branded commodity, and in which agents seek to accumulate art as cheaply as
possible. The history of artists’ collaborations describes a flow of both
resistant and protective cultural formations that moves through time. These
contingent practices change shape according to the necessities of artists’
lives – maximizing their chances to live cheaply with time to work on their
art, and to escape alienated labour, first in the industrial shop, and now in
the service and information industry.

The social organization of artistic production is generally considered to be
extraneous to the forms of art. Indeed, the analysis of each has come to
concern different scholarly disciplines, with formal criticism at one end, and
the sociology of art – and increasingly arts administration and management of
creative production – at the other. The questions of artistic collectivity and
collaboration per se cuts across disciplinary lines. Different adaptations of
the collaborative practice within artistic production have diverse outcomes,
generating
institutions, programs and works of art, as they have ever done.

Artists’ work within groups in the fine arts is very different than work within
most businesses, and even most cultural institutions. While the results may
seem the same – exhibitions, installations, spectacles, publications,
recordings, films, designed objects and architecture – the processes of
self-organized collective work proceed from different premises and toward
different goals. The organizational structure of artistic work in groups has
not been much studied.

This conference stream invites contributes that engage analytically with the
questions of collectivity and collaboration among artists. A materialist point
of view on the question might find that collaboration among cultural workers is
contingent, circumstantial, and practical – an outgrowth of cultural economies
and a necessary condition of many kinds of cultural work. Working collectively
is about making a living. But modalities of collaboration are also a prime
concern of those who want to remake the world, to join the great issues of the
day, and to find a reason to work at all.

Please send proposals / abstracts of up to 500 words to Stevphen Shukaitis (sshuka@essex.ac.uk)
by 31 January 2015. Papers selected
for the panel will receive confirmation by 15 February 2015.

Please note that there will be a registration fee for the conference (the
amount of which has not been confirmed yet), although there is a reduced rate
for PhD students.

Sunday, January 4, 2015

First published in Krisis:
Journal of Contemporary Philosophy, 2013, Issue 3 (in Dutch)

Now available in English: translated by JanEvertse

Willem Halffman and Hans Radder

The
academic manifesto: From an occupied to a public university

1 The occupied university

The university has been occupied
- not by students demanding a say (as in the 1960s), but this time by the
many-headed Wolf of management.1 The
Wolf has colonised academia with a mercenary army of professional
administrators, armed with spreadsheets, output indicators and audit
procedures, loudly accompanied by the Efficiency and Excellence March.
Management has proclaimed academics the enemy within: academics have to be
distrusted, tested and monitored, under the permanent threat of reorganisation,
discontinuance and dismissal. The academics allow themselves to be meekly
played off against one another, like frightened, obedient sheep, hoping to make
it by staying just ahead of their colleagues. The Wolf uses the most absurd
means to

remain in control, such as
money-squandering semi- and full mergers, increasingly detailed, and thus
costly, accountability systems and extremely expensive prestige projects.

This conquest seems to work and
the export of knowledge from the newly conquered colony can be ever increased,
but inland the troubles fester. Thus, while all the glossed-up indicators
constantly point to the stars, the mood on the academic shop floor steadily
drops. The Wolf pops champagne after each new score in the Shanghai
Competition, while the university sheep desperately work until they drop2 and the quality of the knowledge
plantations is starting to falter, as is demonstrated by a large number of
comprehensive and thorough analyses.3 Meanwhile, the sheep endeavour to bring the absurd anomalies
of the occupation to the Wolf’s attention by means of an endless stream of
opinion articles, lamentations, pressing letters and appeals. In turn, the Wolf
reduces these to mere incidents, brushes them aside as inevitable side effects
of progress, or simply ignores them.

Although our description and
evaluation were written from the perspective of Dutch universities, the gist of
our account (and quite a few details) applies to other countries as well,
especially in Europe.4 While
management’s occupation may not be as advanced in the Netherlands as it is in
England (Holmwood 2011), it has already established a powerful continental
bridgehead (De Boer, Enders and Schimank 2007). To show how these developments
are more than just incidents, we list six critical processes and their excesses
below. We will then proceed to analyse causes and suggest remedies.

Notes:

This article is a slightly
updated and edited translation of the Dutch original, which appeared in Krisis: Tijdschrift voor
actuele filosofie 2013
(3), pp. 2-18. We are grateful for helpful commentary on that version by the Krisis editorial team, in particular René Gabriëls. We would also like to thank Ilse
and Jan Evertse for translating the
Dutch text into English.

About Me

I am a Visiting Fellow in the College of Social Science at the University of Lincoln. I was previously a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Education at Anglia Ruskin University (2014-15). Prior to that, I was previously a Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at the University of Northampton. My interests are in Marxist educational theory, the future of the human and social time. The Rikowski family web site, The Flow of Ideas can be found at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk,
My Wordpress blog, 'All that is Solid for Glenn Rikowski' is at: http://rikowski.wordpress.com,
Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski
@ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski